Issue 8 / December 2017

Aunt Mathilda holds the snowflake charm in her hand; her sixth sense takes charge; she places it in a drawer. A woman visits her niece’s consignment store with check in hand and Mathilda puts two and two together. “Christmas Charm” is a story in the wonderful Mathilda series by Piper Templeton.

A long-haul truck driver, Nathan sees only ghosts—“robots”—on I-70. The loneliness gets to him until he meets Gail at the OGALLAH PUMP ‘N’ SNACK, an emergency pit stop. “Haul” by Alex Nichols is an everyday story—except for the robots.

In the oblique and dreamlike style of Marguerite Duras, Viviane Vives weaves memories of her ancestors and place—Nice, Barcelona, Perth, New South Wales, Texas—in “Dialogues With Your Notebook,” a stunning literary achievement.

In “The Winning Fish” by Natalli Amato, the narrator Lindsey lives in the kind of town where everyone notices everything, even the addition of just one more. Read the first paragraph carefully. Clues abound and the ending satisfies.

She leaves Radhika to explore the mountains of Andhra Pradesh—not a travelogue kind of adventure—and finds Sandeep a quasi-willing partner in a preordained exercise. Read how it ends in Karen Bell’s “How To Name and Claim Romance.”

A call puts Harry in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis his wife Joyce and an old girlfriend. He’s never cheated on his wife but he can’t help himself. Consulting her on-line profile beforehand, he goes looking. In “Today’s Edition of the End of the World” by Andrew James Talbot, “the past has broken into the present.”

In Neil McGowan’s story “Pic,” “a wee man” comforts eighty-year-old Audrey, who has suffered two strokes and is confined to her bedroom. In her final moments, Pic stays with her until the owl lifts her into the sky. Fantasy and reality are one.

His fingers “as strong as steel,” Carlos the Uncanny performs out-of-this-world flips on the trapeze bar when he hears Wagner’s music. Then he starts losing years and life isn’t the same in “Flight of the Valkyries” by Amanda Pampuro.

“Old Blue” by Bryn Chamberlain is a tender coming-of-age story about a teenager; his black Labrador “Blue”; and a power lawn mower, also named “Blue.” This trio makes the difference after his father leaves. Love and ambition—“inextricably entwined.”

With anti-depressants in hand, Anthony Capitanio catches the bus to attend a Catholic High school. His severe anxiety disorder ramps up when he sees Joe, the best pitcher in the little league. Then things go haywire in Chris Pellizzari’s “Game-Winning Hit.”

At a Halloween party, a man in a horrific Scream Ghostface mask tells Jane he’s on his way to collect “an unfortunate soul from Scotland.” In Maria Savva’s “Where Do We Go?”, the divide between life and death is as slim as to be nothing at all.

Breslin White’s poetry is matter-of-fact, yet the irony in “Whence” plays with this pragmatism. “With Mother,” the line, “Some of these shapes look suspicious” injects a contrary interpretation. And the poem “All Alert”? Readers, like the swans, are “placated with the transformation.”

It’s hard to match Samuel E. Cole’s lyricism. In “Instinct,” it’s the visualization of the child’s “heartbeat adrift/among the sounds of/cosmic collision”; the natural imagery as foreground in “Cherry Horses”; and the narrative of poverty wailing “multitude horrors” in “Epiglottis.”

Leigh Fisher shows how the art of poetic narration works in “Fairer Hands,” in which the poet tries “to scale a ladder that was never made to be climbed”; and in “Diploma for Daedalus,” where no labyrinth prevents her success “with this degree in hand.” In “Dotted or Solid” she learns “the goal/is obeying the road’s lines.”

Elizabeth Luchniski shows us how to see women as individuals in “12 Ways of Looking At a Woman,” just as she does two men who “share a laugh/Discuss the unknown” in “Skyless Sky.” And “A Poem Is” a poem “That you may need,/But only if/You can feel it.

Nostalgia has a significant influence on humanity, and the wistfulness in Maya Roe’s poetry is poignant. The three stanzas “In Land I Knew” illuminate the poet’s remembrances as if you the reader were experiencing the land itself; so too in “Tangles” and “1941/2017” as entrances to the inner heart of memory.

Take the alleged mundanity in “Trash-Burning”—“Out here it’s most weekends in the summer”; the personification of the “chair-back straight” tree in “Memory Tree”; and the Latin “vocat/aestus in umbra” in “National Bohemian Pastoral,” and you glimpse Mercer Bufter’s poetic philosophy.

E. Merrill Brouder’s poetry is not limited in style or meaning. See the poet professing his love on the Ferris wheel in “County Fair, Senior Year”; delivering an encomium to the natural world in “Hallelujah, Hallelujah”; and asking, “What will become/ of the MERRILL lot/now that everyone has left?” in Genealogy.

Unmistakable in Adam Que’s poetry is his down-to-earth perspective, as presented in the narrative of Reye’s syndrome in “The Leftovers”; the concrete image of “Chaco shredding the pollo” in “Tuesday”; and the rich irony between “real” nature and “a downloaded app” in “Simulation.”

Read Renoir Gaither’s poems out loud and catch the meaning collapsing into rhythmic meter, as in this tercet in “Morning Papers Waltz”: “Salutations to subway dreams and spearmint gum./Salutations to asphyxiating oil addition and asthmatic Raqqa streets./Salutations to corporate welfare recipients mewing at public troughs.” The same is true of “Envelope” and “Auction.”

There is a special resonance in Louis LoRe’s poems. In “Community College of Vermont, the Early Days,” you hear the girl think “with hopes of becoming.” In “When I Awake” you feel the fear as “he rises to his haunches” and escapes. And you realize the boy can no longer be innocent of the apocalypse of nuclear war in “Sunday Morning.”

A spiritual passion awakens in Ann Christine Tabaka’s poetry. The titles instruct: in “Cutting Through the Fog” the brume swallows the poet whole; in “Eternal Games” the story, like uroboros, eternally chases “its own tail”; and in “Brokenness” emptiness reaches out, “searching.”

An unambiguous pathos permeates Clara Burghelea’s poetry in, for example, this line: “I would have grown forgetful, had I stayed” in “My Own Key Slotted in Your Door.” Then, in “Survival” “love gave its sorrow a name/and drowned it.” And “how can I breathe breathless into the air of you?” in “On Life’s Meaningful Pauses.”

In each of Mart-Matteus Kampus’ poems visualization is key. In “Funabulism” a cat devours a mouse, “his red/whiskers/tightrope/walked/in the clear/morning air.” In “Click” the camera eye embraces all of what it sees—“sky,” shy moon,” “gentle summer.” And then there is “Chrysalis”—a feast of imagistic verse.

“The Greatest Scientist of of a Generation” is Scott Wilson’s satirical take on what is the serious problem, CCD, or colony collapse disorder. Scientists couldn’t agree on the source of honeybee deaths, a real problem because honeybees are the pollinators of fruits like blueberries, vegetables like broccoli, and nuts like almonds. Scientists, corporations, and the INTERNET are tagged here.

Sophia DuRose says it loud and clear in her essay “And.” She refuses to be labeled, having learned a lesson of discrimination against her Jewish faith when she was a teenager. Rather than taking the opinions of others at face value, she writes that we must “create our own opinions of worthiness and self-assurance.” Taking a line from Maya Angelou as her axiom, Sophia DuRose will, “like the air,” rise.

It’s a summer afternoon and Maya Roe can’t write. The “overdramatic and rambling” prose hitting the page isn’t working. So, she goes out intentionally looking and seeing and feeling. Nature is not symbolism or metaphor. It just is. Stream and Forest. Bees and Moss. Cattails and Blueberry trees. All of this an “inexplicable world” to love.

“I’m Not Asking” is excerpted from Elizabeth Richardson’s science fiction novel, SportHacked, A Game of Emotional Halloween, about a woman whose life has been destroyed after it’s been taken over by computer hacking and what she does to put her life back together. Rory Scott was an accredited counselor, but “after six months of daily sabotage, my life taken from me,…I am now ready to do something extreme.” And what Rory does is extreme, but what choice does she have?

Read the first chapter of Barry Potyondi’s novel Life Sentence before reading the preface. This is merely a suggestion, but it allows you to read Chapter 1 without presumption or judgment. Thus unfettered, you will be struck by the raw emotion that builds from the first sentence to the last, and, so engaged, anticipate the consequence of rejection and hardship in a combustible mix. Then, return to the preface. It will open your eyes to the eugenics movement during the 20th century in Alberta, Canada, that destroyed thousands of individual lives.

The third story in Michael Radcliff’s series Tadhg and the Seven Dragons takes us to the island of Hawaii where Tadhg must stop Duana, his young friend who has been possesed by the "Other", and find Greatwing’s relatives. Braving molten lava, Merlin’s traps, and dark tunnels, Tadhg journeys into the depths of the volcano to face the unknown and save his friend.

Part 2, Chapter 1 of Daniel Talamantes’ novel With All Our Faults begins agreeably, with the nameless narrator indulging in a burrito while watching a World Cup match on his computer. Yet, Talamantes mixes up his observation of the game with his reflection about life—“somewhat like a burrito, the more you indulge, the more you unwrap, it is nearly impossible to recover”—leaving you in a state of unsuspected suspense: What is really happening here?

Vanessa Christie introduces us to her noir mystery novel, Strangers You Know, and what an introduction it is. The story opens forcefully as we are introduced to the criminal and the cop; the details of the crime; and what we anticipate will be an intricate and fast-paced plot. You anticipate these characters facing difficult decisions as they track each other down—and consequences that will upend both of their lives.

This excerpt from Banerjea’s debut novel begins with a gang arrest in a neighborhood in south London, but the focus of the chapter is the immigrant woman who reminisces about her happy childhood in pre-partition Bengal. She implores her professor father, her Baba, to allow her older brother, her dada, to take her to the cinema. The wish is granted, and she experiences for the first time the Mukul cinema, “its well-decorated marquee at the entrance and walls pasted with big posters announcing forthcoming features.” Along with other girls chaperoned by older brothers, she and her dada sit in the very front row and watch the giant gorilla carry Ann in his huge hand and disappear into the jungle, as the Mukul cinema is “filled with the shrieks and cries of children.”

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